Hello, SmartThings community! I’m the engineering lead at Perch, a new IoT startup in private beta. Perch lets you turn your phone or laptop into a live home monitoring service.
One of the features that we are most excited about is our SmartThings integration. We’d love for you guys to take an early look and share your feedback.
Linking your Perch account to SmartThings allows you to control devices directly from our real-time video interface – and take action in your home. You can mouse over a light, for instance, and click to turn it on. Or click on a door to lock it.
You can also program Perch to trigger SmartThings when it detects motion in specific parts of your house. If the dog jumps on the sofa, for instance, you can trigger a siren, or blare loud music on the speakers. Or just turn on your dog’s favorite TV show.
To join the beta, please download our free Android app at http://bit.ly/perch_beta. If you don’t have an Android phone, you can still use Perch with your laptop and any USB webcam. Just register at https://getperch.com/signup (username:smartthings, password:beta at the prompt).
I am trying it out with a webcam. How do you delete recorded videos? How long will videos be stored? Do you have a support page or any kind of instructions?
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
5
Has your SmartThings connection been submitted and approved by SmartThings?
In other words, what security measures are in place to protect my SmartThings Home, account, and video feeds?
Thanks!
1 Like
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
6
Perch is a division of Samsung Research America, Inc. (“SRA”) and Perch is entering into this Agreement on SRA’s behalf.
Why weren’t you up-front about your relationship with Samsung? I really appreciate transparency… I think a lot of us here do. This is no ordinary “startup” that just happens to be integrating with SmartThings for no reason.
We currently support computer connected webcams and Android phones. New devices may be added in the future. We have spent a lot of time focusing on ease of use and low latency so want to make sure additional devices we add support that goal.
Great questions! Recorded video is stored for 7 days. This feature is on by default for new cameras. We will be providing the option to not record in an upcoming release. To delete videos you have to delete the camera for now (from the account page). We are working on an FAQ which we plan to post shortly.
Developing on the SmartThings platform has saved us a ton of time and effort. But to be clear, Perch hasn’t launched yet, and isn’t an official application of SmartThings.
Your question about security is super-important. Perch is based on the webrtc stack which includes encrypted video transmission (DTLS-SRTP). Authentication is Oauth2.0 and all api access is over HTTPS. Video storage, of course, is also encrypted.
I’m happy to tell you more about the team at Perch. We work out of the Samsung Accelerator in New York. The Accelerator is pretty new, and is made up of a bunch of startups – you can learn more about it at http://samsungaccelerator.com/
Please feel free to reach out to us directly at info@getperch.com if you’d like to learn more!
Stephen
2 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
9
Thanks for the info on the Samsung Accelerator. You’re definitely lucky to be a part of that program! I’m sure we’d all like to hear more about that side of your enterprise.
I will test it more once you have features in place to disable/enable recording. I don’t want to record on my indoor cameras when people are at home. I would like to be able to monitor them remotely. I have 6 foscam cameras in and around my house so I would also need the ability to add ip cameras.
Currently there are two ways to enable/disable recording: remotely (via the Android client or the web app) or by setting up a day/time based schedule. I use the time based schedule to only record Mon-Fri 8am - 6pm. Thanks again for the additional feedback!
I’m curious about the SmartThings integration. When I login to SmartThings from your site, I am able to gain control of the light that I gave it access to, but I am not seeing Perch show up in my list of SmartApps or anywhere else in the SmartThings app or IDE. Where is it?
Do you plan to add Perch “devices” to SmartThings (camera, motion detector, other?) so that it can be accessed from SmartApps?
Hmm, this looks like it would be an interesting add for the 4 tablets i have mounted running Florianz HAD. those tablets are all on all the time; just the screen turns off after no use.
Hmm. We see it in our list of Smart Apps on the phone and associated with the devices that we granted permission to. Not sure if it’s because we are still in private beta?
We wanted to start with a simple integration but I think this would be really cool.
Right now you can only do this on the camera itself (it’s a setting on the capture page). We have plans to allow this change from a remote location.
